BT Reveals Expansion Of Superfast Broadband

BT Openreach has revealed more locations that will be wired up to its superfast fibre-based broadband service.

BT said that a further 156 locations across the country will benefit from its roll-out of fibre to the cabinet (FTTC), which will give customers potential speeds of up to 40Mbps. Meanwhile Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) will provide speeds of up to 100Mbps.

The extension will apparently serve more than 1.5 million consumer and business premises.

Competition Winners

And it seems that most of these locations will be connected to fibre broadband sometime this year, with more than 50 telephone exchanges due to be upgraded by the end of this summer. The remaining exchanges will be offering fibre broadband by the end of 2012.

In an effort to ease BT’s somewhat strained relationship with other service providers, Openreach will provide the industry with a more specific date for the enablement of each exchange six months prior to an exchange being upgraded to fibre broadband.

And BT revealed that the new locations announced today also include the 10 exchange areas that won BT Retail’s recent Race to Infinity competition, where members of the public were asked to cast votes for their community to be upgraded to the BT Infinity fibre broadband service.

A full list of the new exchanges that will receive the fibre rollout is available here.

“Our fibre programme is well underway with more than four million premises now able to order a fibre-based broadband service from their chosen supplier,” said David Campbell, MD of Next Generation Access for Openreach.

“And today we’re announcing a new set of locations serving a further 1.5 million premises, many of which will be able to enjoy the benefits of super-fast upload and download speeds from as early as this Summer,” he added. “We’ll continue to work closely with industry and local and devolved authorities around the country in deciding where to deploy the technology next.”

Strained Relationships?

Despite BT’s efforts to roll out fibre nationally, not all ISPs are happy.

Earlier this week for example, a number of BT’s competitors wrote to communications minister Ed Vaizey, warning of a possible boycott of the government’s £830m investment in rural broadband pilots.

Their complaint was about the cost which BT charges in order to allow them to access its telephone poles and ducting.

BT took issue with the ISPs for sharing their complaints with the media before approaching BT about their concerns.

And in February, a leading BT reseller accused the telco of misrepresenting its fibre-based broadband coverage, alleging that as many as 60 percent of the street-level cabinets are being missed out in broadband-enabled exchange areas.

Meanwhile BT continues to upgrade its existing copper based network, and has announced the extension of ADSL2+ over its copper based network, which should translate to faster broadband  for 80 percent of the country.